The Oak of Jerusalem: Flight, Refuge, and Reconnaissance in the Great Dismal Swamp Region
A Digital Narrative by Christy Hyman
A Desolate Place for a Determined People
The Great Dismal Swamp of eastern North Carolina has come to be recognized as a landscape that historically became a haven for enslaved fugitives. The swamp was connected to the phenomenon called the Maritime Underground Railroad- this involved enslaved people helping others enslaved get to vessels going northward to freedom.
In this action of agency, enslaved people were re-appropriating spaces of confinement within the Great Dismal Swamp region into avenues of escape. The maze of swamps, rivers, and pocosins made the Great Dismal Swamp landscape ideal for hiding out until an opportunity to get northward would come.
The Swamp is bound in the north by the James River in Virginia and in the south by the Albemarle Sound; several rivers including the Pasquotank in Elizabeth City, NC, as well as the western branch of the Elizabeth River and Deep Creek (both in Norfolk, VA) find their headwaters in the Dismal Swamp.
All of these impregnable sites overland and the waterways flowing throughout developed into areas of hideouts, temporary forays, and conduits to freedom for enslaved people possessing the navigational literacy to move through.
The Great Dismal Swamp embodied the promise of freedom as a site of possible refuge, but also the horrors of the slavery regime itself.
"The labour [here] is very severe. The ground is often very boggy: the negroes are up to the middle or much deeper in mud and water, cutting away roots and baling out mud: if they can keep their heads above water, they work on. They lodge in huts, or as they are called camps, made of shingles or boards. They lie down in the mud which has adhered to them, making a great fire to dry themselves, and keep off the cold. No bedding whatever is allowed them; it is only by work done over his task, that any of them can get a blanket. They are paid nothing for this overwork. Their masters come once a month to receive the money for their labour: then perhaps some few very good masters will give them two dollars each, some others one dollar, some a pound of tobacco, and some nothing at all."- Moses Grandy, formerly enslaved waterman, ca.1843
Moses Grandy, an enslaved waterman who worked in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina for more than twenty years describes the arduous conditions that characterized the life of enslaved canal laborers. Grandy's narrative, titled "Life of Moses Grandy; Late a Slave in the United States of America" was published in 1843 and chronicles the period of his enslavement with vivid depictions of the people and places within the Great Dismal Swamp: A place known as “an immense morass” of “black deep mire.” A place covered with stupendous forest,beasts of prey, and amber colored waters.
Grandy and hundreds of other enslaved canal laborers performed the arduous labor designed to make use of and extract available resources from the Great Dismal Swamp.
Moses Grandy's Enslavement Timeline
What is remarkable about Grandy's narrative is how well his experiences shed light on the power dimensions inherent in the institution of slavery. Grandy provides slithers of information on the character of his owners(he was sold several times), the broken family ties that result from enslavement, and the relation between enslaved people and their immediate environment. In the Great Dismal Swamp region, the very spaces enslaved people inhabited as veritable beasts of burden provided narrow possibilities of opportunity with regard to escape attempts.
The map above provides a spatial clue as to how enslaved people working near the Great Dismal Swamp managed to escape-the series of ditches and the canal itself (hand dug by enslaved people) allowed commercial shipping to flourish between Virginia and eastern North Carolina. Because enslaved people had knowledge of the Great Dismal Swamp landscape and were tasked with driving boats loaded with cargo to and from ports going northward, they used these navigational literacies to escape to freedom.
Origins of Settlement
"Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance of what we do not see..."
Cottonmouth snakes, biting flies, mucky grounds, bears and wolves await those who dared enter the Great Dismal Swamp. In spite of these inhospitable elements planter elites sought fortune and enslaved people would seek refuge in the region.
As early as 1728 Virginia planter William Byrd surveyed the area and was quite descriptive of the swamp's ruggedness:
"The surveyors pursued their work with all diligence, but still found the soil of the Dismal so spongy that the water oozed up into every footstep they took. To their sorrow, too, they found the reeds and briers more firmly interwoven than they did the day before. But the greatest grievance was from large cypresses, which the wind had blown down and heaped upon one another. On the limbs of most of them grew sharp snags, pointing every way like so many pikes, that required much pains and caution to avoid. These trees being evergreens, and shooting their large tops very high, are easily overset by every gust of wind, because there is no firm earth to steady their roots. Thus many of them were laid prostrate, to the great encumbrance of the way. Such variety of difficulties made the business go on heavily, insomuch that, from morning till night, the line could advance no farther than one mile and thirty-one poles. Never was rum, that cordial of life, found more necessary than it was in this dirty place."
Euro-American Encroachment-Colonial NC
Had it not been for seventeenth century English colonists' encroachment into Indian occupied areas in the coastal region of North Carolina, Byrd and his survey team would not have had such an opportunity.
A 1715 treaty with the Tuscarora resulted in the displacement from their ancestral lands and relocation to Hyde County near Mattamuskeet.
With no threat of Indians, Byrd and others looking to profit from the Great Dismal Swamp could do so freely.
Learn more about the history of Indigenous people who lived near the Great Dismal Swamp by clicking the following link from the North Carolina Museum of History http://bit.ly/2mFHorQ
Initially Byrd saw draining the swamp as a profitable venture and suggested that "a great sum of money" be invested for such a purpose. In requesting a royal grant Byrd proposed the labor required by starting with "ten slaves to dig ditches, fell trees, render pine tar, grow rice and hemp and tend cattle."
Byrd added that the malignant vapors of the swamp might kill some slaves, but others would breed and supply the loss.
Byrd’s suggestion of the Dismal Swamp business venture would not come into fruition however until November 3, 1763 when several prominent planter elites including George Washington gathered together in Williamsburg, Virginia to discuss how they might profit from the swamp. Finding enslaved people to begin draining the swamp was first on the agenda. Because everyone involved owned enslaved people they would choose their most able slaves. They agreed and resolved that each member “furnish five such slaves for his share by the first of July 1764.”
At that time the following enslaved people were appraised to be delivered to the Great Dismal Swamp:
A Yorktown elite remarked that the enslaved people identified and forced to work in the Great Dismal Swamp were “the worst collection that ever was made...that they were the refuse of the estates from whence they were sent” however the table referenced here names them and the “value” placed on them. These enslaved people were men, women and children who were deprived of any promise of autonomy over their lives.
The Scale of Freedom-Making
Moses Grandy's Navigational Literacy
Moses Grandy explains hiding his sister in the Great Dismal Swamp:
"On [my sister's] journey homeward(after escaping a slave trader), she traveled by night, and hid herself in thick woods by day. She was in great danger on the road, but in three weeks reached the woods near us. There she had to keep herself concealed; I, my mother, and her husband knew where she was: she lived in a den she made for herself. She sometimes ventured down to my mother's hut, where she was hid in a hollow under the floor.
Her husband lived twenty-five miles off: he would sometimes set off after his day's work was done, spend part of the night with her, and get back to work before next sunrise: sometimes he would spend Sunday with her. We all supplied her with such provisions as we could save. It was necessary to be very careful in visiting her; we tied pieces of wood or bundles of rags to our feet that no track might be made."
Freedom Seekers: Enslaved Fugitives of the Great Dismal Swamp Region
The Importance of Adequate Clothing During Flight
The levels of survival under the stranglehold of enslavement as it relates to the enslaved laborers existing under the institution of enslavement is difficult to imagine or access.
In making the flight to freedom enslaved fugitives had to have adequate clothing that could withstand the elements, but also the rough terrain they would traverse through. Thick brush in contact with the coarse material of "Negro cloth" also known as osnaburg (pictured here) impacted their ability to keep themselves fully clad and warm in colder months.
The Slave Patrol
An enslaved person’s navigational literacy aided their knowledge of landscape and increased the chances of making it into the Great Dismal Swamp. The bonds of family living within close proximity of the swamp was extremely beneficial to enslaved runaways in instances where getting food or help with possible injuries was required along the journey. In any case, enslaved fugitives would also have to have been stealthy enough to outrun the slave hunters whose primary job was tracking down runaways with teams of specially trained dogs.
Getting caught meant a number of devastating consequences which included being sold (usually further south) and punishment by whipping. The account below is from Sally Hadden's Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. A "sworn whipper" describes his job:
An Alternative Notion of Freedom
Enslaved runaways tapped into alternative notions of freedom by risking the terrifying consequences involved in running away. Patrolers, "negro dogs", the elements, and inhospitable terrain awaited those who took those fateful steps.
The image of Huey Newton is used here to convey the radical essence of freedom-making within a punitive landscape of trauma- The Great Dismal Swamp.
Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance of what we do not see...
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